If you find a junkyard head with TERRAPLANE cast into it, you must buy it immediately. That’s the law.
With all the junkyard exploration I do, I run across quite a few very old vehicles that just fell through the cracks and ended up in the big high-inventory-turnover yards alongside all the Mercury Sables and Hyundai Accents. 1950s cars are commonplace in such places, and even the occasional 1940s machine shows up. You won’t see many 1930s cars in your local Ewe Pullet, however, and so the 1937 Hudson Terraplane in a Denver-area self-service boneyard caught my eye immediately.
This appears to be a vehicle that started life as a sedan, then got a quick-and-dirty backyard truck conversion many decades ago; during World War II, trucks could get better gasoline rations, so many cars were sliced up and given beds made of lumber and scrap metal. It’s just a gutted shell that probably sat in a High Plains field since Harry Truman was in the White House.
But! While the cab was just a fetid steel box full of mouse poop and rust, the original 101-horsepower Hudson flathead straight-six remained in the engine compartment. For what I’m betting was at least 75 years, it endured rainwater leaking into the cylinders, snow building up in every crevice each winter, and blazing summer sun baking the rodent excrement into an epoxy-like substance. There’s no way this engine would ever turn over again, but seeing it gave me ideas that didn’t require engine function.
One of the greatest blues songs of all time— actually, make that one of the greatest songs, period, of all time— has the Terraplane as its nominal subject matter. Therefore, I had no choice but to extract that cylinder head and take it home.
After I finished photographing the nearby ’73 GMC C2500 Sierra Grande with 454 big-block, just a few rows over, I ran home and swapped my metric toolbox for the one with all the old-fashioned SAE stuff… and a nice hefty breaker bar. Though it was a just-above-freezing Denver January day, the sun was shining and I knew I wouldn’t get too cold.
Unfortunately, none of my Old Detroit-friendly tools quite exactly fit the fasteners on the Terraplane’s head. Either the Hudson Motor Car Company engineers actually preferred 21/32″ and 17/32″ hexagonal heads to 11/16″ and 9/16″ or they were still using Whitworth sizes decades after nearly every American manufacturer had gone to SAE standard sizes. I own some Whitworth tools, but hadn’t thought to bring any to the yard, for obvious reasons. Hours later, I had managed to remove all 21 nuts (or snap off the very rusty head studs), plus a lot of affiliated fasteners that had to be removed in order to get access to the head. Then I had to chisel away 75 years of fossilized rat crap and break the head free of its embrace of the head gasket.
This yard has a fixed-price policy, with cylinder heads selling for $61.29 plus a $10.00 core charge. I felt that a head from a flathead engine was really more of a valve cover than a cylinder head, and so I held that I should be charged the $21.59 for a valve cover. This question took on near-theological significance among all the car freaks working the cashier counter, and eventually we agreed to split the difference between the two. The Terraplane head was mine!
I considered bringing my newly acquired Terraplane head right to the shop that sandblasted and powder-coated the wheels for my 1969 Toyota Corona lowrider, so I could have the head cleaned up and finished in a jaunty color.
However, so much horrible stuff kept falling out of the water passages that I decided to postpone a cosmetic cleanup of the head and just hang it up on the wall for now.
I have sheathed the walls of my garage with 3/8″ plywood, which is a bit echoey but means I can install shelves or whatever without looking for studs. I drove a pair of temporary 16d nails into the studs (turns out the spacing between the #2 and #6 spark plug holes on the Terraplane head comes to about 16 inches), hung the head on them, then ran in some deck screws with fender washers through four of the head-stud holes. The head weighs about 50 pounds, so this rig should hold it up just fine.
So there it is, next to the 1966 Nebraska license plate that came with my 1941 Plymouth and a NOS F-8 Crusader dash panel that I saw on eBay and felt compelled to buy for a future junkyard boombox project. Yes, that’s the legendary Wanky the Safety Cat on a shelf nearby, nearly 15 years after I built him.
Keyword: When You Need the 1937 Hudson Terraplane Cylinder Head for Your Garage Wall